Statecraft and Liberal Reform in Advanced Democracies

ISBN-13: 9783319642321 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 189 str.

Nils Karlson

Opis

This book explains how advanced democracies and welfare states can achieve welfare-enhancing, liberal institutional reform.

Recenzje

"From an in-depth comparison between the Swedish experience and the Australian one - another success story of reform - the author develops the best theory yet on how to understand - and pursue - reforms." (Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, martenscentre.eu, February, 2018)
"Karlson provides a lucid inventory of the barriers to reforming the welfare state, all of which will be familiar to public-choice economists. ... Karlson has written a fine book, one that needed to be written. He has traveled far toward understanding how liberal reforms happen and thus how they might happen again." (John Samples, Cato Journal, Vol. 38 (2), 2018)

"Nils Karlson makes an important contribution to the economics of institutions by providing stimulating theoretical insights and two interesting case studies. ... this is a thought-provoking book, which I recommend to a wide audience of readers - including non-economists - and which opens new research agendas in at least three different respects." (Enrico Colombatto, The European Journal of Comparative Economics EJCEm, Vol. 15 (01), 2018)

Spis treści

1: Introduction.- 2: Barriers to Reform.- 3: Two Reform Countries.- 4: Explaining Institutional Change.- 5: Reform Cycles and Reform Strategies.- 6: The Swedish Reform Process.- 7: The Australian Reform Process.- 8: Modern Statecraft.- 9: Summary and Conclusions.

O autorze

Nils Karlson is Founding President and CEO of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm and Associate Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Blurb

This book explains how advanced democracies and welfare states can achieve welfare-enhancing, liberal institutional reform. It develops a general theory based on an extended comparative case study of Sweden and Australia over the last 25 years, and offers an in-depth contribution to the field of institutional change, explaining how to govern a country well and how to overcome different barriers to reform, such as special interests, negativity biases and media logic. It develops the concepts of the ‘reform cycle’, ‘reform strategies’ and ‘polycentric experiential’ learning in order to explain successful reforms, and the key role of policy entrepreneurs, who introduce and develop new ideas. The book further examines why these reforms came to an end. Karlson also applies the ideas of Popperian, Kuhnian and Machiavellian reform strategies, and explains why they are needed for reform to come about.

The theory of modern statecraft presented here involves a combination of knowing wha

t and knowing how. It has the potential to be generally applicable in any advanced democracy with the ambition to improve its economy and society. This book is of interest for anyone who is concerned about budget deficits, slow growth, over regulation, lack of structural reforms and the rise of populism. It will appeal to scholars of political science, public policy and political economy.